As computer technology has advanced, computer users have grown accustomed to greater ease of use when utilizing computers. For example, modem devices, which permit a user of the computer to among other things connect to the Internet, have gone from external devices having separate controls to internal devices controlled through a keyboard operatively coupled to the computer.
However, this ease of use has not fully extended to display devices for computers, such as monitors housing cathode-ray tubes (CRTs). Characteristics of display devices, such as brightness, contrast and volume, are usually controlled through separate controls on the display device itself. As the size of the monitor in a typical system has increased, and as the applications in which a computer is used more as a home entertainment system than as a business system have become more common, the monitor is frequently located far away from the rest of the computer system. Controlling the characteristics of the display device in these situations poses a disadvantageous inconvenience to the user of the computer.
Even computer designers are disadvantaged by this lack of ease of use in controlling display device characteristics. For example, laptop computer designers are forced to integrate the controls for the display device of a laptop computer, typically a flat panel display such as a liquid crystal display (LCD), as hot keys on the keyboard. However, this means that proprietary hardware and software typically must be developed for every different type of laptop to control the display device characteristics, which is burdensome and costly.
Software-only solutions to controlling display device characteristics are also problematic. Such software-only solutions are usually stand-alone or terminate-and-stay-resident programs. For example, a user of a PC-compatible computer running a Microsoft Windows operating system may load a stand-alone program from a hard disk drive into memory. A drawback is that such a stand-alone program is operable only if the Microsoft Windows operating system is used. The program may also not be compatible with other programs running on the computer. Most significantly, such stand-alone programs must be the active program in order to work. For example, a user who loads such a program and then subsequently loads another program has to first reselect the program before being able to use it again.
Terminate-and-stay-resident programs also have numerous drawbacks. Terminate-and-stay-resident programs operate at a lower level within the operating system than do stand-alone programs and therefore stay active all the time. However, they are generally still specific to a particular operating system, and cannot be used with different operating systems running on the same computer. Furthermore, such programs are known to be incompatible with other programs, limiting their usefulness. Terminate-and-stay resident programs also take up valuable lower or base memory on a computer (i.e., the lowest 640 kilobytes of random-access memory on a PC-compatible computer).
There is a need, therefore, for controlling the characteristics of the display device without having to use the separate controls on the display device itself. There is a need for providing for such control without the need for burdensome and costly proprietary hardware and software. There is a need for providing such control that is not specific to any particular operating system. There is a need for such control in a manner that is compatible with other programs that may also be running on the computer at the same time, that does not take up base memory, and that is active to the computer user at all times.